Several years ago I heard about this book by some porn star that was yet to be written: It was "How to Make Love Like A Porn Star" by Jenna Jameson. The brainchild of Judith Regan and Jameson, the book was, at first, going to be a sex guide from the most famous porn star in the whole wide world. A big hit, for sure.

At the time, I worked closely with a number of other sex educators and sexologists, and we all felt the pain when the book was announced. Here was yet another porn performer, one of those who do athletic and unsafe sex for a living, telling the world to use spit instead of lube (which Jameson did, notoriously).

The book then had, I suppose, an identity crisis; from what I heard it chewed through a couple ghostwriters, yet came out as one of the more fun, trashy, tabloid-style bios I'd read in a while. A sex guide it wasn't (phew!) but it was like a year's worth of Defamer-lite and a bag of chips, so I enjoyed it. I read it in three days.

While Exotic Erotic East ... I mean the AVN Awards, is gearing up for its expo in Las Vegas this weekend, don't you wonder what it would be like if someone really wrote that book? I mean, how to really "do it" like a porn star. It's so glamorous, and men's magazines are always trying to teach the fellas how to trick their girlfriends and wives into being more like porn stars in bed, and kids these days ... well, where else are they gonna learn about sex?

I hate to break it to you, but first, the title would be a misnomer. Porn stars don't "make love" — except maybe to the camera. They make the sex, and they get the paycheck.

Porn performers occupy the small end of the gene pool: They don't look anything like you or me, and that's why they got the job. They don't need to cuddle before or after sex, they are extremely limber and can withstand holding difficult positions under hot lights for extended periods of time. They wax their balls, asses, vulvas, chests and backs. They get surgeries you've never even heard of to plump or sculpt everything from labia to breasts to calves. They have sex with total strangers every day, and the successful ones make it look like it's not a job. Studios like local Kink.com know that what their models do is an extreme sport (and at Kink, accent on the "extreme" part), thus they treat their performers and models like Olympic athletes.

The films are edited to make it look like everyone's having a good day; there's no PMS, no periods, no birth control, no STDs (and miraculously, no safe sex!), no headaches, no farting, no meltdowns and no disabilities. The condom exception is on gay porn sets where they're handed out; in straight porn condoms are laughably optional as the pool of straight performers rely on their AIM test results as their ticket to perform.

But wait — if you have sex like a porn star, women orgasm from the slightest stimulation! Girls, want to kiss like porn star lesbians? Just lick tongues, it fools everyone. On camera, anyway.

How to be penetrated like a porn star

Dana DeArmond boiled it down for me in one succinct sentence: "Wash it and f-." Stop trying to turn me on, Dana. Vaginal douches are standard — and douching is really not good for the vagina, at all (it strips out all the helpful, protective bacteria). Sure, cleanliness is the basic wish we all have when we hook up, but for professional on-camera sex work, it's a lot more involved than taking a shower before your date. For instance, say you wake up on Sunday morning and think you might try a little anal sex with your sweetie. You get up and discreetly use the restroom and wash, maybe do a little prep with a finger and some lube to relax the muscles. It's not like porn where they're "always ready" for the baseball bat or fire hydrant to pop right in there. Right.

But if you want to do it like a porn star, how does an early Sunday morning 6-7 quart enema sound? Pretty hot, I know. (Before church! Just getting that one out of the way for the comments.) Most of us are like, "You want me to put what, where?"

Tristan Taormino politely tells us, "Each porn star has his or her own ritual to prepare for an anal scene. It usually involves a nice deep-cleaning enema either the night before or the morning of the scene. Some will also do a little "rinse" right before the scene. Some people won't eat at all until after their scene, others will only eat a light meal."

But being penetrated in porn, no matter your gender — whether it's vaginal, anal, or oral — is "bottoming." Jack Shamama from San Francisco's GayPornBlog.com, who has been on more gay porn sets than there are boobs at AVN — from the top studios to amateur and everything in between — explains the details:

"If a guy is going to bottom in a porn, they must — with no exception — douche about an hour before their scene. On every set I've ever been on, a private place is set up for the bottom to collect his thoughts and hose himself out — usually a bathroom stocked with Fleet Enemas. In (production name redacted), the producer appointed the bathroom of my hotel room to be the doucheatorium, which was both gross and inconvenient. During this time, a bottom might warm himself up with a dildo, but for the most part they're experienced at bottoming and they don't require much warming up before the scene starts filming.

More disciplined and/or self-conscious bottoms will also limit their food intake for 24 hours before their scene (which has the added bonus of making them appear slimmer on-camera). Some merely pop an Immodium. I once witnessed a group of bottoms threaten to walk off a set en-masse because craft services only served bran muffins.

As a group, gay guys tend to be a pretty self-conscious and tidy bunch so they tend to show up to a set trimmed, waxed and polished to sparkling clean. Three times I saw hygiene-related problems arise, all involving straight or 'gay for pay' performers during their initial foray into gay porn, including one very famous male star doing his first J/O for a gay studio. Sort of makes sense, since porn produced for straight men tends draw focus away from the male body, often cropping as much of it out of the frame as possible. It's embarrassing and painful for everyone involved when the director has to stop filming and send a model to the bathroom to clean up because he flashes a 'brown eye.'"

As for giving oral sex like a porn star — well, personally, before fellatio, I sing arias from Puccini, Verdi and Wagner (respectively), practice swallowing my own fist six or seven times, then I gargle with a quart (no less) of Pennzoil. Oh, and I don't eat for three days beforehand, especially not bran muffins. Or Kamut. I don't know how the porn stars do it. Think they're natural born sword swallowers? They're not. But boy, are they like oral Cirque du Soleil stars, or what?

How to f- like a porn star

Male porn performers are just like any regular guys. With unusually large penises, the ability to maintain an erection and poke things with it in weird spread-legged positions for hours, and to ejaculate copiously, with distance and target-based accuracy. In front of a camera crew who are bored and hope to get home on time, while slaving over a hot starlet who is also probably bored and hoping to get home in time for "America's Next Top Model" or her mani-pedi appointment, and waiting for the director to tell him when and where to come. Yup, it's easy. Any guy can f- like a porn star.

Jack, who apparently knows his way around Dick, informs us:

"It's rarely discussed openly, but ED meds (Viagra/Cialis/Levitra) have become de rigueur on most sets and are usually dispensed as causally as condoms and lube (I should point out that it's always up to the model whether or not to take them — I've never seen or heard of anyone being "forced" to take them). Some models rely on more drastic measures and show up to sets with Caverject — a hardcore ED treatment that pre-dates Viagra, and requires an injection directly into the penis. Caverject is extreme: it tends to cause a numb but rock-hard erection lasting as long as 10 hours. Despite some horrible side effects (and downright terrifying application!) some guys insist on using it because, unlike Viagra, they don't have to think about it — they just stay hard for hours and hours."

Blue headlines at conferences ranging from ETech, The Forbes Internet Leadership Conference, LeWeb and SXSW: Interactive, to Google Tech Talks at Google, Inc. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.